The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook Author: Matt Dinniman Genre: Fantasy, Sci-fi Released: 2021 Rating: ★★☆☆☆ Welcome to the Gun Show! The top 10 list is populated. The sponsorship program is open. The difficulty is ramping up. The first three floors were nothing compared to what Carl and Donut now face. The Iron Tangle. An impossibly complicated subway system built out of the world's subterranean railway systems, all combined and then tied together into a knot. Up is down. Down ...

Hello! Recently I needed bike lights for my bike. And I remembered that I already had rechargeable bike lights that I bought ten years ago, that I hadn’t tried in a long time. I tried to recharge them, but after fully charging them, they only worked for maybe 5 minutes before they turned off again. I don’t know much about electronics, but I’ve been curious about whether it’s possible to fix old electronics for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect repair project because I might...

I hope you're not tired of the 8087, because I have another article about Intel's floating-point chip. 1 In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, making floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. In this article, I look at the algorithm behind the chip's tangent instruction. One popular approach for trigonometric functions is an algorithm called CORDIC. Another approach is a polynomial approximation. The 8087 combined the two to obtain both high accuracy and high performa...

In my first months as a physics journalist nearly a decade ago, I kept running into an inscrutable string of characters: AdS/CFT. Thoroughly intimidated, I decided to just ignore it. But I couldn’t keep my head in the sand for long. I soon learned that those characters are shorthand for a surprising connection between the seemingly inharmonious worlds of gravity and quantum mechanics. Source In my first months as a physics journalist nearly a decade ago, I kept running into an inscrutable s...

Travellers & Tinkers, CC BY-SA 4.0 I Look, if you are still stuck on “AI cannot really think, it’s just a stochastic parrot”, please snap out of it and lock in, or you’ll keep repeating that line until you find yourself sitting in the corner chair, watching as ChatGPT™ has sex with your wife. If you’ve paid attention to the HuggingFace hacking scandal and to what’s going on in mathematics , we’re well past the “stochastic parrot”, and have entered a world in wh...

Mitsui & Co. scored 4.83 out of 5 in OpenWork’s 2026 employee-review ranking. Disco, a semiconductor equipment maker, placed first among large employers in Great Place To Work Japan’s 2026 list. This guide to the best companies to work for in Japan sets four 2026 rankings side by side: staff reviews, workplace surveys, student preference and average pay. National engagement, wage and hiring data follow. Best Companies To Work For In Japan 4.83 Mitsui & Co.’s score in OpenWork’s ...

I've been getting into film photography lately. Read more on the site… I've been getting into film photography lately. Read more on the site… I've been getting into film photography lately. Read more on the site… Read more on the site…

The 59th ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing takes place in Atlanta next June, part of the Federated Computing Research Conference . I don't usually do announcement posts but we need to talk about the Call for Papers  (deadline November 2) where In light of rapid advances in generative AI and their impact on research and scientific communication, STOC 2027 is experimenting with several new policies intended to encourage high-quality submissions and promote clear and effective communica...

The Quay, Olaveaga, Bilbao by Luis Paret y Alcazar, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at ASML’s lack of European sales, a California distributed power plant, Starlink as a planetary barometer, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but a more involved piece about how the AI that power...

It’s common to compare the current AI takeover of software engineering to the rise of AI in chess. Chess AIs went from much weaker than serious players to much stronger than even the strongest humans. Between those points, there was a middle period dominated by “centaurs”: human-AI partnerships that were stronger than unassisted AIs or humans. Lots of people think that we’re currently in a world of software engineering centaurs. According to them, coding AIs are not yet capable enough to...

I've been working on my homelab for years, and I enjoy sharing what I learn through this blog and my YouTube channel. Over the past few years, I realized the homelab community (which isn't really a defined thing—that's okay) hasn't had its own gathering, the way makers, software engineers, embedded developers, and HPC professionals do. There are many events that have crossover into the homelab realm, but nothing focused on energy-efficient servers, privacy-respecting self-hosted softw...

Two people slightly in front of me, to my left, crane their heads to the sky, following the one-hundred-and-eighty-year-old structure to our right. They slowed down as they walked. Does awe have a pace? I walk past the monument often, a reminder of the literary history of the city, and of Scotland – dedicated to Sir. Walter Scott. Was this the first time the couple had seen the statue? What a special moment that must be. As the couple slowed, I found myself slowing down, too, looking aroun...

By Dhruv Pratap Introduction Organizations that have been around for a while usually run two identity systems side by side. One belongs to the cloud provider: IAM roles, instance profiles, execution roles. The other is your own, and it is the one your internal services actually check when they decide whether to answer a request. On infrastructure you build yourself, you can bootstrap your own identity however you like. On managed compute you cannot. The provider hands your process a cloud ide...

After spending 25 years in defense acquisition, last month marked one year since I joined Shield AI. It feels like an appropriate time to reflect on our work on the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, what that work reveals about the changing role of software in defense, and how government and industry can meet SECWAR’s call to accelerate delivery of capability to the warfighter. Before I arrived, the Air Force had selected Shield AI to integrate Hivemind mission ...

For more than fifteen years, LMFAO has been synonymous with party rocking. Today, we need to acknowledge the harm that party rocking has caused. When we released “Party Rock Anthem” in 2011, we believed that everybody wanted to have a good time, and that it was appropriate for us to make them do so. We understand now that this was a misguided assumption. Too often, we measured our success by how hard we had rocked the party without asking whether the party wished to be rocked, or whether e...

“I had the red shoes all along” loosely from The Wizard of Oz Introduction It is not that unusual today to find LLMs connected directly to an execution environment. In most cases, a considerable amount of research into APIs of the LLM service and the host execution environment is required to make this work. The following brief note and transcript of my session with Grok recount a surprisingly simple path to this union in the case of Livelymerge. It was achieved in less than an hour ...

I’ve been backing up my home directories on my NetBSD machines to my FreeBSD backup server using rsync(1) . But I’ve been experimenting with using ZFS for /home on NetBSD, so I thought it made sense to use zfs send for backups to the FreeBSD machine instead. But there’s a caveat here. NetBSD’s ZFS only includes support for a subset of the features that OpenZFS on FreeBSD provides. Therefore, if this pool is intended to be used with NetBSD, the FreeBSD zpool should be created with ...

Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love . It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well. Just jogging your memory; I reached out to you (and John Carmack) about how difficult interviewing had become despite me being a stellar engineer at my work. You offered some words of wisdom, wrote me a postcard, which I still hav...

Like many programmers, I find Alexis King's Parse, don't validate article fascinating, because it gives a name to an idiom that seems familiar and important - one I've observed and used in the past without naming it explicitly. This post is a review of the "Parse, don't validate" pattern applied to the Rust programming language (the original post uses Haskell). I was particularly interested in finding educational examples of this pattern in the Rust standard library and other well-known projec...

Hello, we have very unusual Friday facts for you. Journey to the physical world Pard It all started in the hot summer of 2024 when we worked really hard to finish the Space Age DLC. The game was almost ready, but we wanted some feedback from our players. A decision was made to organise a playtesting event ( FFF-427 ), where teams of players could play the game from start to finish and provide us with in-person feedback and criticism to deliver the best product you a...

Rob Bowley is “flipping tables in his head” with anger at the current media coverage of the danger of AI killing us all The risk I’m worried about isn’t a future machine deciding to wipe us out. It’s today’s AI, being wired into everything, carelessly and fast. Cyber attacks have already cost millions of dollars in lost economic output, often without AI being involved at all. Bowley feels the push to slow down AI is distracting us from the problems that are lurking with ...

Autumn always makes me feel like I ought to be back in school, either to learn or to teach. In turn, that makes me think about student projects I would like to run. Tools Bram Bram (“Bram runs agents mindfully”) is a desktop app that embeds Claude Code and Codex in a GUI that provides structured, audited workflows. This project will add several new features, including support for other families of models such as DeepSeek. A Little WYSIWYG Editor Web Browser Engineering builds a...

Yesterday was Grok 4.7 ( pelicans ) and MiMo v2.6 Flash/Pro ( more pelicans ). Today Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 , and around an hour later OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna . It's going to take a while to get a good read on all of these new models, but here are my impressions so far. GPT-6 Sol and Luna are half the price of their GPT-5.6 equivalents GPT-5.6 Luna was already my favorite model for building applications against, because it combined excellent performance wit...